I need to be a teenager more often

Today I went to my counselor, ready for her brilliant solution, and she told me there wasn't one. Apparently she 'staffed' my case, which means she told the other counselors in her office about my problems and they talked about it (no specifics), and they all told her that the eating disorder was a big deal, and ingrained, and that it was too big to have an easy solution.

It's horrible, to have hope, and to hear that, to hear it's going to be just as hard as I've always feared, to hear there's no fixing something that started so unobtrusively with one fell swoop. I wanted to hear that there was some place I would go and they would fix it for me. I suppose residential treatment is a really plausible option right now, but I don't want that, and my counselor is willing to continue trying to work with me as an outpatient. And we have no other resources in my semi-small town.

So I was a little depressed, and I wanted to shake it off. After school Erin and I went to Dairy Queen and I got my sugar-free fat-free orange concoction, not guilt-free, but not binging. We went to a park, and there were all these people running around in this fountains, you know those squares of ground with all the holes that water comes shooting out of, teenagers and adults and little kids all running around in their clothes in the heat. People... looked so happy, it hurt. Happiness always seems to hurt me in some profound way. Anyway, Erin and I went on the climbing wall, the monkey bars. It was raining and I went down the slide and the butt of my jeans got all wet and I didn't care. That's being a teenager... that, the return to innocense, to childhood. People think that being a teenager means responsibility, busyness, homework, making out, sex, swearing, depression, emo-existence. But... they're so wrong. That's not being a teenager. Being a teenager is going back and being young again, laughing, running through fountains, going down slides. Being a teenager is recovering all the screwed up parts of your childhood that never quite worked out, and relinquishing them at an age when you're more equipped to appreciate them.
"Never too late for a happy childhood."

Tonight I went to a baseball game with Stevie. The weather was so perfect, and the grass was so green, and summer was descending slowly, its parachute encompassing the warm air. We talked as the teenage boys slid around the bases, as our hometown lost spectacularly. We cheered for the other team, sometimes on accident, sometimes on purpose. We laughed, joked, etc.

I was young. There wasn't the seriousness, the fear, the guilt, the hatred. I'm so used to social situations being like feeding frenzies. I'm constantly panicked about being judged. I'm always worried that I'm annoying. I'm always telling myself to shut up. I hate that sinking feeling when one of my friends puts me down (which Siobhan does a lot). Sometimes all the heaviness of it collapses so much inside of me that I lose all the joy of my friends. Today was good, playing on the equipment, watching the fountains and the baseball game. I remembered that the panic isn't what it's supposed to be about. Friendhips are supposed to be about more than that...

I'm so frustrated, angry, upset, lost in this eating disorder. I would like to kill it, if it was something I could kill. I am more angry at it than I am at my mom, when I am in that blind rage. But I'm still human... I can still be young... I can still go back and live in the ways I missed before.